The Damascus Nuclear Missile Explosion of 1980 | Episode 75 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Bad Day at Work episodes are some of my favorite.
Sometimes you put out a brochure with a typo. Sometimes
you ding the boss's car. Very rarely do you accidentally
destroy a thirty million dollar nuclear missile. Hello, and welcome

(00:31):
to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going
to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe
inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout
human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll
learn the history of human violence all the way from

(00:52):
paleolypic shoving to nuclear annihilation. I will teach you everything
you need to know to actually sneak into a new
your missile silo. And there is a disaster in this episode,
but unlike most, this one will incorporate the phrase blown skinless.
And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear
how frighteningly close we have actually come to accident alarmageddon

(01:16):
and the one man who saved all of humanity. You'd
learn why the government spends ten thousand dollars on a hammer,
you'd learn all about how you can buy your own
nuclear missile silo, and you'd hear the story of the
fastest man made object of all time that actually predates
the Sputnik launch. This is not the show you play
around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company.

(01:39):
But as long as you find yourself a little more
historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life,
our work is done. So with all that said, shoot
the kids out of the room, put on your headphones
and safety glasses, and let's begin. When I was a
little kid, I accidentally hit a girl in the head
with a rock. The only thing smaller than the rock

(02:00):
was the mark that it left on her head, but
her reaction was huge. I was maybe six years old
at the time, and I immediately felt awful, and not
just because she took it like a gunshot and probably
caused more injury to her throat screaming than I could
have ever done with that stone. But while all this
was happening, I never felt like I was fulfilling some

(02:20):
genetic predisposition or anything, you know, like some kind of
preprogrammed need to lash out against an enemy. That said,
as long as proto humans have walked the earth, not
even upright, necessarily, let's say, as long as eight based
sentient creatures have had hands, We've picked off rocks and
we've thrown them at people. As far as we know, violence,

(02:43):
as we understand it, started somewhere in the Paleolithic Era.
That's a long ass era started about two and a
half million years ago, and it only finally wrapped up
about ten thousand years ago. Think of it as caveman days.
So what was it like back then? Well, people are people.
They're pretty weak and flimsily designed, and there is plenty

(03:05):
of evidence of early man getting kicked or speared to
death by a creature that vastly outweighed them and had
horns or antlers built right in. You can actually see
our Corelais episode to learn way more about all that.
But the Paleolithic Era wasn't just a time for humans
to get stomped out. During this time, humans learned to cook,
and this process actually makes proteins easier for us to ingest,

(03:29):
and after millions of years of cooking plant and animal proteins,
our brains and our brains potential grew, and all that
growth helped us to create complicated social lives, which coincidentally
was around the same time when we first find skeletons
with stab marks. The earliest evidence of human on human

(03:49):
violence was on a skull with blunt force trauma that
was found in a cave in southern China from around
two hundred thousand years ago. And here is a bit
of strange trivia. That same boy that we found evidently
had its face eaten off by a porcupine. And on topic,
that's not even the weird part ready of all the
evidence of human on human violence throughout early history, if

(04:12):
you bucket it all into different causal categories, the majority
of evidence is going to sit in a single bin
titled cannibalism. There's no way to say whether they were
dead before they were eaten, only that they were a
succulent meal. Were these people taking advantage of a fresh
corpse in a bad situation, or just being sketchy opportunists,

(04:35):
whatever the cause. Evidence of man on man non noms
started about seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago. The
first being to pick up a stick and club someone
else over the head was probably feared and treated like
a prehistorical god of war. As time went on, sticks
became spears, Spears became arrows, and we built these concepts

(04:56):
into catapults and cannons and eventually flying projectiles. John Paul
Sartre is famous for having said that hell is other people.
I have a print of that phrase in my living room.
They're definitely words to live by, and now that we
could enter into complicated relationships. It came with conflict and resentment, confusion, sadness,

(05:18):
fear and anger, and rocks and spears and burning oil
and all of it. Most people believe that categorically the
most actively violent time in world history took place between
the years of nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty five.
We'll never know the exact body toll from World War II,
but the best guess is around seventy five million people.

(05:43):
To make that more tangible, a Dodge caravan carries seven passengers.
The funeral possession of Dodge caravans needed to carry the
entire death load from World War Two would stretch from
London to South Africa almost six times. That's about a
third of the way to the Sun, all because of
a drug addicted egomaniac with only a third of a

(06:04):
real mustache. World War One was supposed to be the
war to end them all, except for the Greek Civil War.
The Indochina War, the Arab Israeli War, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, the Sino Indian War, the Nigerian Civil War,
the Soviet Afghan War, Iran Iraq War, the Russo Chechen War,

(06:28):
the Libyan Civil War, the Yemeny Civil War, and whatever
we're calling Russia versus Ukraine and the aforementioned World War Two.
But outside of all that, the world settled into a
kind of peaceful detente. War went cold and although countries
were spending more on weapons than ever before, they were

(06:50):
pretty much all for show. The Cold War was a
war in the sense that everyone was ready to fight,
they were just waiting for a bell to ring. The
potential was there for death on a scale unimaginable in
the history of human conflict. And why well did you
see the movie, Oppenheimer. From the moment that the world

(07:10):
read about mushroom clouds rising over Japan, the course of
all human history was irrevocably changed. It all started with
Russia and America trying to outspend each other while over
developing nuclear weapons, and people around the world worried about
being melted or vaporized. From the nineteen fifties, all the
way to the nineteen nineties. Today, the United States still

(07:34):
maintains a pretty robust stockpile of nuclear arms and the
systems to deliver them. I call them launchables. You got
your nuclear capable bombers, you got your submarine launched ballistic missiles,
and of course land based missile silos. Missile silos began
back in nineteen fifty nine, and it started with Atlas
rockets and then moved on to the Titan series. But

(07:57):
where to put them? Holes were dug across the country,
across the Great Plains from Montana all the way to Missouri.
And no spoiler here, but we're going to be spending
our time in Arkansas, the Wonder state Arkansas and Kansas,
or two states. You might not think of all that often,
but they became mission critical to the entire nation's defense strategy.

(08:18):
Throughout the nineteen sixties, there were thirty six of these
silos scattered throughout north central Arkansas. There used to be
more than a thousand buried across the country, each capable
of bullseyeing a target up to eight thousand miles or
over twelve thousand, eight hundred kilometers away and within one
mile of accuracy. Both sides were armed to the teeth

(08:39):
and under no illusions about the idea that any kind
of attack would spin out into a full on goon fight.
Really simplifying things here, At the end of the Cold War,
most of the silos were decommissioned and only about four
hundred remain active today. Well what about the rest, Well,
did you know you can actually a decommissioned missile silo.

(09:03):
I mentioned how military planners chose the Great Plain States.
It's because it offered the shortest launch trajectory, as the
crow flies to hit the Soviet Union just right over
the North Pole. But more importantly, its geographic location bought
the America the most time to launch a counter attack
if enemy missiles were already inbound. And it didn't hurt
that you could plunk a silo in a field outside

(09:24):
of some farming community in the middle of nowhere and
not have to worry about any protesters chaining themselves to
construction equipment and pouring fake blood all over themselves. If
you're wondering why silos in the first place, why not
just surface gantries, you know, so our enemies can see
our might from afar and quake. Well, sure, that's how
it started. But nuclear weapons were more than just military weapons.

(09:47):
They were also a deterrent and a heavy psychological weapon.
The concept of mutually assured destruction relies on each side
in a conflict knowing exactly what the other side has.
One silo, one missile, at least until somebody invents a
rotating underground missile silo like a nuclear six shooter. Burying

(10:08):
missiles deep in the ground offers privacy and security, sure,
but more importantly, they are way harder to destroy. That way,
mushroom clouds could start dotting the landscape and missiles and
silos would still be all okay, my turn. Best way
to think of a missile silo is kind of like
an underground vertical fortress. Try to picture an extensive underground

(10:29):
complex of tunnels built strong enough to take a nuclear
goose egg. I mean, if you ever see photos or
footage of one, they're always capped with a giant hexagonal
cover that slides out of the way in the event
of a launch. And slide is probably the wrong word.
These things are seven hundred and fifty tons of reinforced
concrete and steel that is three and a half feet thick. Yeah,

(10:50):
getting into a nuclear missile silo is gonna be the
most difficult thing that you try all day. First, there's
a fence. Wait, no, the show not over. There is more.
The fence has a sign that lets you know that
you are not welcome, and the next people that you
meet have permission to shoot you repeatedly. And if you
parcore your way out of all that, a sensor network

(11:13):
lays beyond to detect any kind of surface level approach.
But let's say you got past the fence, the secret scanners,
and the kill happy guards. You're still not getting in
without a passcode. Incorrectly enter the twenty one character passcode
just once and the key pad shoots you in the face.
And if you managed to dek that, you now have

(11:35):
to get past a two thousand pound personal access hash. Okay,
let's say somehow you managed to squeeze past that. Well,
now you need to do a ninety foot hopscotch over
the correct series of floor panels through a shaft while
darts shoot from the walls. At least this is what
I have heard. Beyond that is a second fourteen thousand

(11:55):
pound barrier called the B plug. I should point out,
don't care what kind of oceans eleven planning you've got
going on in your head. These doors are designed to
withstand the force of a nuclear explosion. You're also going
to need a second code and a second unfriendly keypad.
Oh and those are just the traps and snares that
we know about. Do you think the US government just

(12:18):
puts all this out on their website? Well they don't.
So there I have taught you, step by step how
to break into a nuclear missile silo. Please do not
tell the authorities. Please do tell your best friends and
ask yourself, would your second favorite podcast do all that
for you? Silos are built to withstand natural and unnatural disasters.

(12:38):
They're constructed from heavy reinforced concrete almost ten feet thick,
with shock absorbers to protect sensitive equipment inside. And nothing
is more sensitive than a nuclear missile. Each missile carries
a nine megaton warhead, the W fifty three thermonuclear warhead.
It was the most powerful weapon in the entire U

(12:58):
s Arsenal at the time. And I can already hear
you saying, professor, can you walk us through how a
thermonuclear warhead works? Well, okay, first, I'm not a professor,
but sure, let's go. Thermonuclear warheads are the Reese's peanut
buttercups of atomic weaponry. First, it uses an atomic bomb

(13:19):
similar to those dropped in World War Two to split
atoms of heavy elements like uranium or plutonium, creating an
incredibly hot and powerful explosion, and this triggers a secondary
explosion where lighter atoms like those in hydrogen are forced
to fuse together, which releases even more energy. So a
thermonuclear warhead uses both the splitting and fusing of atoms

(13:43):
to create a much bigger explosion than just some regular,
old fashioned atomic bomb. I'm glad we all got to
live long enough to call atomic bombs old fashioned. I mean,
that's something. So how powerful were these new warheads? Okay,
this is going to be good. If you stood near
a nuclear device, you'd think, wow, that is a lot

(14:06):
of potential for destruction in such a little package. They
have models of peace and a museum just outside Las Vegas,
and they have the power to make you nervous just
standing there. So think of this. If you took every
single bomb dropped during World War II by every country,
and that includes Fat Man and Little Boy, the nuclear

(14:27):
weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, And if
you took all of those and put them together into
one massive housing, you would defecate yourself unconscious just standing
near it, and it would be the most frightening thing
in whatever hemisphere it was sitting. The non nuclear bombs
alone would have numbered in the tens of millions. Now

(14:49):
you take all that and you triple it, and you
have something close to the power of a single Titan
two warhead. The star of today's story the USAF LGM
twenty five C titaned I intercontinental ballistic missile to be exact,
each a one hundred and three foot tall, three hundred

(15:11):
and thirty thousand pounds towering symbol of the Cold War's
colossal nuclear tensions. And believe me, people were already pretty
afraid of nuclear armageddon during the nineteen eighties, but not
nearly enough. If a bomb this powerful had gone off
over New York City, people in Yonkers would be blown skinless,
and people as far as Stamford, Connecticut would be pulling

(15:32):
class out of their faces. Now, something I didn't mention
about working in a nuclear silo. They're maintained and operated
by specialized Air Force personnel trained in the complex security
protocols associated with nuclear weapons. It was one of those
no turnover jobs, if you follow my meaning, anyone working
in a n ICBM silo knew that they would definitely

(15:54):
be among the first to die in an actual nuclear war.
The missile crews, the maintenance guys, even the guys up
top reloading the darts in the tunnel walls all dead.
By international law, the location of every country's nuclear silos
are made public knowledge. Well maybe not to the public exactly,
but they have to be disclosed and are immediately marked

(16:15):
down by every other nuclear nation as a first strike
or retaliation target or both. Our story takes place on
the evening of September eighteenth, nineteen eighty. We will be
spending the night at Launch Complex three seventy four to seven,
located in Bradley Township, Van Buren County, just over three

(16:36):
miles or five kilometers outside Damascus, Arkansas. It's about fifty
miles or eighty kilometers north of the capitol in Little Rock.
This was one of the eighteen silos under the command
of the three hundred and eight Strategic Missile Wing and
the three hundred and seventy fourth strategic Missile Squadron. When
you descend into the depths of a Titan two missile silo,

(16:58):
you are entering a different world. Each silo is a
subterranean fortress designed for one very specific purpose. There's a
three level launch control center built out of steel reinforced concrete,
with three ton blast doors separating various areas from the
surface and each other. Tunnels connect the launch control center

(17:18):
to the actual missile. Walls are lined with instruments and
control panels, and everything is meticulously organized. The air is
cool and dry, and there's the faint hum of machinery
all around you. Working in one of these demands a
high level discipline and focus. Crews work in shifts, maintaining
the missile and its systems, ensuring everything is ready at

(17:40):
a moment's notice, and just waiting for the signal to
destroy the world. To make sure no one single person
could ever actually launch a missile alone, a two key
system was used. Two operators would turn two keys simultaneously
in control panels set far enough apart so that no
one could turn both keys alone. This also made sure

(18:01):
that the terrible responsibility of ending the world was a
shared activity without getting too technical about missiles. If you
pulled all the skin off the Tighten two missile, it
would pretty much just be two giant chemical tanks. One
holds propellant while the other holds an oxidizer, and if
they mix, even without a source of combustion, they will

(18:21):
set off an explosive chain reaction that propels the missile
at ridiculous speeds to ridiculous heights, to travel a ridiculous
distance and create a ridiculous amount of damage. The Tighten
two ICBM could travel at twenty four thousand kilometers or
fifteen thousand miles per hour from an Arkansas cornfield to

(18:42):
a target anywhere they wanted in thirty minutes or less.
There are two troubling things about the design. First, the
tight and two missile was fueled with arazine fifty and
nitrogen to troxide, which are both highly volatile and toxic
as fun. And second, the missiles were designed as a
one time use vehicle. You know, they're only making a

(19:04):
one way trip. So because of that, the tanks were
tasked with double duty and were designed to contribute to
the rockets structural integrity. All that means is if one
or both of the tanks started losing pressure, they could
actually deform and start to cave in on themselves. Of course,
the only way for them to lose pressure would be
a leak, and if both tanks leaked one hundred thousand

(19:26):
pounds of fuel, an oxidizer would mix and that would
be that. Around six point thirty in the evening of
September the eighteenth, the control operators reported a drop in
pressure on the hydrozene tank in the second stage of
their rocket. Well, we just talked about that. That's not great.
So a Propellant Transfer System Team or PTS for short,

(19:48):
were called up from the Little Rock Air Force Base.
Airman David Powell and Jeff Plumb were sent into the
missile chamber. They'd been asked to check the pressure on
the oxidizer tanks and confirm the leak. To do this,
Powell brought a ratchet wrench about three feet or a
one meter long and weighing twenty five pounds to access
hatch panels above the missile. But he was supposed to

(20:10):
be using a socket wrench. If you don't know the
difference off the top of your head, a ratchet wrench
is the one that lets you turn the handle back
and forth without removing the wrench from the fastener. And
the socket wrench is the one that you throw in
a cartoon. You got your noisy woman, and you got
your quiet one. And Powell had already suited up, and
he was all the way below ground before he'd even
realized that he had brought the wrong one. He accidentally

(20:32):
brought the noisy one. And yeah, it seems like we're
splitting hairs, but the Air Force has policy on tool use. Still,
it's the worst that could happen. To be working around
something that could evaporate an entire city has to be unnerving.
I mean, looking down in the silo would have been
like staring down the barrel of a very well lit
gun with a very big Bullet's just got to make

(20:55):
you nervous, maybe a little sweaty, maybe a little too sweaty,
like maybe you're having trouble palming your tools and wow, whoops,
one slips from your grip. Yep. Everything had been going
to plan until Powell accidentally dropped a socket from his wrench.
The socket, what's that like? Ut an ounce, No, this

(21:16):
is a nuclear missile, owned, operated, and paid for by
the US military and they are not known for doing
things on the cheap. You ever dropped nine pounds on
your foot? Well, I have, and it took about a
year and a half to regrow my toenail. Nuclear missiles
don't exactly use off the shelf parts from home depot.
The socket that he dropped weighed nine pounds. It slipped

(21:40):
off the wrench and fell about eighty feet or twenty
four meters down the shaft. And it wasn't a huge deal.
I mean, workers dropped tools down these things all the time.
Even the documentary crew that tried to recreate the events
that I am about to tell you ended up dropping
multiple sockets down their own silo recreation, just entirely by accident.
The occasional buttery fingers wasn't that weird, But this was

(22:02):
a little different. See when the socket fell, it bounced
off a thrust mount and ricocheted right into the side
of the missile. It would have connected with about four
hundred pounds of force, and it pierced the missile skin
over the first stage fuel tank. Luckily for the people
in the silo, movies and TV have done a terrible
job teaching you what happens when you pierce a pressurized

(22:24):
oxidizer tank with a projectile. What it didn't do was
burst immediately into flames and explode. No, instead, it started
spraying a high pressure jet of nitrogen tetroxide, which I
can tell you has the twin powers of corrosion and volatility.
The oxidizer leaking into the silo created a toxic mist.

(22:44):
The reason that nitrogen tetroxide is so dangerous is because
it's hypergolic, and I don't expect you to remember what
that means, but we did talk about it during our
Intel Set Rocket Disaster of nineteen ninety six episode. Long
story short, it's not even flammable, but this stuff will
furiously ignite if it comes into contact with the missile's
fuel arazine fifty, like we said, but in its non

(23:06):
exploding mist form. Just sniffing the stuff causes pulmonary edema, which,
if you'll remember, means choking to death on the fluid
in your lungs. You can touch it, but it would
be the last thing that you ever touch, so honestly,
you just choose anything else except for maybe nitrogen to troxide.
It's pretty much just as bad. While all this was happening,
Powell and Kennedy decided to clock out early and bounced

(23:29):
out of their double time. Senior officers assess the situation
and weigh their options. And you might not know this,
but all of this falls directly in the lap of
the US Air Force. The same people who give us
all free GPS and sidewinder missiles are also the same
people responsible for the operation and control of every land
based intercontinental ballistic missile and silo in the country. So

(23:53):
they call two more of their best from Little Rock
to come and investigate the damage at the silo. No
one wanted to die in a rocket expres but the
priority was to make sure that nobody died because of
the nine megaton thermon nuclear warheads sitting on top of
this thing. Specialist Greg Devlin was part of the prepellant
transfer system team called in to make sure that that

(24:14):
didn't happen. Something you should know about propellant transfer system guys.
Some people say that they are about as crazy as
bomb disposal texts, And like bomb disposal texts, there's actually
not a lot of jobs in the US Air Force
that qualify for hazard as duty pay. There's a million
different things to do in the Air Force, but only
about five thousand people in the entire organization actually qualify

(24:37):
to receive hazardous duty pay. Even firefighters didn't qualify for it.
But these PTS guys did. Control systems in the underground
launch center monitored pressure levels while the rest of the
team put on their spacesuits. When they entered the silo,
they immediately figured out that unless the tank voluntarily self sealed,
there was zero chance of somehow repairing this damage. I

(24:59):
remind you the story of the Little Dutch Boy was fake.
They probably thought that they should probably talk about it
in their truck driving to Canada, but they didn't. They
had to try. Hours passed as they toiled feverishly, never
forgetting for one second that the slightest spark would mean
instant retirement. The oxidizer levels in the tank had dropped

(25:21):
so much by now that they were seriously worried that
the missile was facing structural collapse. The Stage one fuel
tank sat at the bottom of the missile. Quickly emptying
and detectors designed to identify a volatile conditions found that
the atmosphere was extremely explosive, but for whatever reason, they
were unable to vent all of these fumes out of
the tunnel, and they had no reason to think that

(25:43):
some empty chamber was going to hold the weight of
the rest of the entire missile. If the fuel tank emptied,
the rocket would buckle in on itself, and the oxidizer
in the fuel would combine and spontaneously explode, like we said,
and in this fashion, the silo would work just like
a gun. On topic, my Patreon listeners are about to
hear the most fascinating story ever told about explosions and projectiles.

(26:09):
Fumes have been building and rising in the silo for
six and a half hours, and I told you that
nitrogen tetroxide was corrosive. Well, just before three am, the
men were ordered back in to measure just how much
fuel was left in the silo, and as soon as
they entered, they found themselves at risk of their suits
melting off, So back out of the hole they came.
Do you know they rate toxic substances kind of the

(26:32):
way they do ski hills. They use a diamond system,
and nitrogen totroxide gets three diamonds. If it's not totally
clear what that means, Nitrogen to troxide is the kind
of compound that creates immediate and permanent injuries, like the
kind of breathing problems where you cough up a kind
of froth and then your skin turns blue and then
become stupid and you can't make things so good and

(26:55):
you're exhausted, and then you die. The reason they didn't
scream all the way to kid Canada was this wasn't
the first time something like this had happened. There was
actually a fatal silo accident not that long before this.
On August the twenty fourth, nineteen seventy eight, there was
an oxidizer leak in a silo in Kansas. Who seems
pretty familiar. Imagine fueling your car truck and when you

(27:19):
go to pull the pump back out, the nozzle has
this quick disconnect valve that fails and fourteen thousand gallons
of fuel spew back all over you. Yeah, you can
believe people screamed and ran. The people in the silo
were wearing productive clothing, but not the people outside the silo,
and they got a pretty strong whiff when the doors opened.

(27:40):
Most of the workers were able to bail through the
control center blast doors, but one of the doors malfunctioned.
And four people got trapped, two died, one had permanent
damage to his lungs and vocal cords, and another lost
total use of an arm. And of the two that died,
one died from direct exposure. The other died because he've
been performing mouth to mouth on his friend. It just

(28:03):
goes to show this stuff is the mountain dew of
propellant components. So you got one of the most high
security jobs in America, but the only thing you're feeling
secure about are your chances of contracting cancer or vaporizing.
Would you know what to do? Well, thank you for
serving your country, but let's see what we can do

(28:25):
to get you all the way to retirement. You might
be exposed to dangerous chemicals, like we've said, and you're
not looking to gargle rocket oxidizer, So grab a pencil.
You're going to be doing some shopping now. It is
customary for SILO personnel to wear their proper uniforms, which
indicate rank and function. Well, I'm going to make a
stylistic suggestion. A toxic spil rated chemical resistant PPE full

(28:50):
body suit with gloves, boots, goggles, and a full face respirator.
Just the whole shebang, don't cheap out. If your workplace
contains aerosols and talk that can melt your clothes, job
one is keeping them off your skin and out of
your lungs. You'll want full body coverage with something non corrosive,
and you're gonna want to make sure that whatever respirator

(29:11):
comes with it is equipped. The cartridges rated for chemicals
as strong as arozine and nitrogen to troxide, And just
like at a gas station or your cat's litter box,
depending on what's leaking and whether it's pooling on the
ground or hanging around like a cloud if it's wet,
there are absorbent materials that we can use to trap
it and keep it all from spreading. All kinds of things,

(29:33):
pads that absorb it, your boons to corral it. You
got granules to suck it up. If you don't know,
I am currently babysitting a dog with a nervous stomach,
so I know what I am talking about. TVs and
movies have taught us that all the best poisons come
with antidotes. There are substances that can safely neutralize toxins
like arozene and nitrogen to droxide. You just need to

(29:54):
do your own homework to find out what you can
get your hands on. But you should really find out
exactly what you're facing before you hit up Pentagon dot
shopping dot org. But while you're waiting for shipping, don't worry.
You will have no problem knowing for sure if you
have come in contact with any of these things. For one,
it will burn. And if you did have any of
this on your skin, you're gonna want to rinse that

(30:16):
area for at least fifteen minutes. You're not gonna get
all clever. No one's throwing vinegar, baking soda on it.
What you are doing is calling emergency services and letting
them decide if they want you to come in or
if they want to send someone to you and who.
If you're working in a place where the gases are
plenty but the ventilation is glitchy, might I suggest using

(30:38):
non sparking tools. You might not have ever heard of these,
but there are non sparking versions of shovels and scrapers
and even brooms that prevent you from accidentally turning your
workplace into workpieces. And if something does blow out and
starts gassing up, in your face. May I recommend sealent
putty and no, that's not dumb, And yes you are.

(31:00):
It's pretty much the same idea as flex seal, something
that you can just slap on a container or a
pipeline and seal off a leak long enough for you
to run for it. If somehow you don't have an
eyewash station or a shower on site, you can get
a first aid kit equipped with eyewashed solutions and burn
treatments specifically for chemical exposures. And may I suggest training

(31:22):
on the use of all your spill kit and emergency
response before you have a problem. Pro tip it's harder
to spitball this kind of event when you are nervously
fogging up your own respirator mask. By now, the entire
facility had been evacuated, but they sent Livingston back one

(31:43):
last time to get the fans working to help vent
the fumes out. About the time Livingston entered the silo,
it's about three oh one am. The missile tank collapsed
and the rocket exploded, the silo, the launch control rooms,
everything absolutely destroyed. And I tried the math that much

(32:04):
fuel would have produced an explosion equivalent to about sixty
four tons of TNT for comparison. You ever hear of
the MOAB. It's an American military anagram for a massive
ordnance air blast, but most people just call it the
Mother of All bombs, and it's said to be the
largest non nuclear device ever built. Well, the blast produced

(32:27):
at Damascus on this day was six times as powerful
as the MOAB, and it was concentrated. I'd keep coming
back to that gun barrel analogy, but it's true. If
an explosion this size had gone off at service level,
the blast energy would have radiated equally outwards in all directions,
but not here. Some small amount of energy was lost

(32:48):
pancake in the silo walls outward, but the rest had
nowhere to go but up. A huge fireball went up
two thousand feet in the air, the blast scent the
seven hundred and fifty ton three and a half foot
thick reinforced concrete and steel silo cap, flying two hundred
feet through the air like a bottle cap, and it
was found about six hundred feet away, sitting in a ditch. Now,

(33:10):
I talked about a fireball, and I talked about things
flying around, but I never described a mushroom cloud. I
want to know why. Well, incredibly, the warhead had been
designed to take a beating, and as impossible as it
is to believe, it survived. As we have shown in
all of our nuclear disaster episodes, they are impossibly well

(33:32):
built with safety systems on top of safety systems. It
had been damaged, and it was taken back to Little
Rock by a convoy of military trucks. And on that
day everyone living in Arkansas should have bought the original
designers a beer, and Kennedy should have bought a lotto ticket.
He'd have to crawl in his hands to the store
to get one, but he would be alive while he

(33:54):
did it. He had been blown one hundred and fifty
feet through the air away from the silo by the
pressure wave. Incredibly and amazingly still alive. Livingston had taken
the same trip, but he really did not survive the experience.
The silo had been evacuated beforehand, but twenty one other
workers who were off site but nearby were also injured

(34:16):
by the blast. Someone else did the math and figured
out that if the warhead had exploded, there would have
been about three thousand fatalities, with probably another nine thousand injuries.
It would have produced a three and a half mile
or five and a half kilometer fireball that would have
killed about ninety percent of the population living within thirty
miles or fifty kilometers. Oh and the radioactive fallout could

(34:40):
or would have spread as far as Atlanta, giving it
the hot landa nickname. Just a whole lot earlier. This
was an absolutely incredible and unprecedented incident, or was it? Well, no,
not really. Actually, the military even has a code name
for times like this. They call it a broken arrow.
It's code for any accidental loss or destruction or detonation

(35:03):
of a nuclear weapon. A lot of people thought that
the ICBM was a solution to crazy nuclear mishaps. You
just keep him in the ground static, not flying around
in the belly of a plane twenty four hours a day,
just waiting to fall apart or crash or get shot down.
So what the hell happened? Well, as with all things,

(35:25):
to dig into the historical cause of the problem, we
look to Richard Millhouse Nixon. Most people remember him from
the whole Watergate scandal, and if you don't, Nixon was
the sitting president of the United States of America and
this guy arranged a break in at the Watergate Hotel,
which was serving as the Democrat headquarters in Washington, and

(35:46):
his guys got caught. What became known as the Watergate
scandal was like amphetamines to journalists, and they uncovered all
kinds of abuses of power, illegal activities, substruction of justice.
Nixon's availed and harassed his political opponents and journalists, and
it all came to a head when Nixon resigned in

(36:06):
nineteen seventy four to avoid impeachment. This guy even made
the already unpopular Vietnam War even weirder by quietly agreeing
to illegally bomb Cambodia. It was all very, very bad,
and the next time that we saw him, he was
giving the country the fingers in front of a helicopter
on the White House lawn. Currently, he's residing in a

(36:28):
three by eight by six foot piece of real estate
in yor Belinda, California. He chose to quit rather than
to be prosecuted. But some of the things he did
weren't all that bad, and that's where the problem starts.
This mockery of a bad Halloween costume also started the
Environmental Protection Agency, and he eased tensions between the US

(36:50):
and the Soviet Union by entering into strategic arms limitation talks.
They called them salt treaties for short. The idea was,
if you retire a missile, will retire missile, and both
sides kind of liked it, not even so much for
the optics, but just because it meant they got to
turf some older missiles instead of continuing to endlessly pay
to maintain them. And because of this, more modern weapons

(37:13):
programs started siphoning away the Titan two's budgets, especially from maintenance.
You'd take your lack of funding a stockpile of nuclear missiles,
random fuel leaks, malfunctioning equipment, faulty vapor detection systems, faulty
ventilation systems, and no money to fix or replace any
of it, and you understand why the people who worked

(37:33):
in the silos wanted hazard pay extended to all workers.
As secret of as missile silos were, it was no
secret that the people who worked in them knew that
they were way more likely to die in an accident
than in an actual nuclear war. Many of the missiles
were kind of bumper stickered with material patches to cover

(37:53):
up corrosion and metal fatigue. Staff were so busy fixing
old problems that no one had time for new ones,
leaks which sprung almost daily. Case in point, in August
of nineteen seventy nine, at a launch complex outside Haber Springs,
they were testing the emergency lights. I mean that sounds
pretty okay, Well it wasn't. A metal rod somehow snapped

(38:14):
off a wall which created a short circuit and a
wiring panel which then burst into flames. But the fire
detection system was offline, and it took so long for
staff to find the actual fire that the missile that
they had had actually heated to the point of almost detonating.
These kinds of things happened regularly, and that's the other

(38:35):
thing about disasters like these. You don't get to learn
the lessons from earlier incidents because they were all classified.
Case in point, May the twenty fourth, nineteen sixty two.
That is a while ago, but this was the date
of history's first major missile silo incident, and it happened
in Chico, California. A fire led to an explosion which

(38:58):
destroyed most of us and everyone evacuated so no one died.
Investigators figured that a malfunctioning ventilation system was to blame
for the whole thing, but because the incident was so secretive,
no one talked about it, or thought about it, or
thought about how to fix the ventilation glitch here or
in any of the other affected silos, which led to

(39:21):
the worst or deadliest American industrial accident to date, happening
at a nuclear missile silo. Just three years later. On
August the ninth, nineteen sixty five, a welder nicked hydraulic line,
which led to a massive fire inside of a silo.
They needed to devent the smokeout, but surprise, ventilation system

(39:42):
wasn't working, and the silo was still capped by the
seven hundred and fifty ton slab of concrete. Fifty three
people died, which is a lot considering this was the
first fatal accident inside of a silo. And funny, not
aha funny, but just funny that the ventilation system was
such a big problem here in Damascus. You'd almost have

(40:05):
to wonder if there is some kind of connection here,
simple enough to draw with your own foot. The full
details of the Damascus Titan two explosion were only made
public in twenty seventeen, and believe this or not. When
all was said and done, investigators only made one suggestion,

(40:25):
putting better tracking devices on their warheads for when things
like this happen. The cleanup to Damascus was over two
hundred and twenty five million dollars. Incidents across the rest
of Arkansas totaled about fifty million, and Kansas had about
twenty five million in its own accidents to deal with,
and the US military slowly began retiring the Titan two

(40:49):
missiles starting in nineteen eighty two. That was a full
five years earlier than originally planned. They were by then
the old dismissile, still in use by the US military
from nineteen sixty two all the way to nineteen eighty seven.
It was twenty five years and they were phased out
and replaced by solid fuel missiles like the MINIMN one

(41:11):
and two. They were just so much safer to handle
and they had a way better safety record. But for
those who worked in the silos over the decades up
till then, a lot of them took souvenirs home with them.
Let's see neurological issues, cancers, tooth decay, stomach problems, and
even extreme hearing loss. No doubt most due to repeated

(41:32):
exposure to toxic fuels and oxidizers and accelerants, not to
mention the warhead itself, which oozed its own ionizing radiation
the entire time. And it didn't just affect workers. Locals
Downwin reported headaches, respiratory illnesses, and the occasional dead livestock.
The State Office of Pollution Control attributed their symptoms to

(41:52):
mass hypochondria, and all those silly cows died hysterically from
collapse lungs and toxic exposure shrug. Immediately after this disaster,
authorities launched an emergency response to contain the damage and
prevent any further contamination. There was also an extensive cleanup operation.
They decontaminated a bunch of stuff, and they even did

(42:14):
an assessment of the impact on the surrounding communities, which
was classified, so the public never found out the extent
on the impact on public health. So that was a
bit of a wank. When the Damascus silo exploded, it
shook houses seven miles or eleven kilometers away, and when
the locals had enough and decided it was time to move,
they just couldn't. No one was going to pay for

(42:37):
poisoned property on cursed land. In total, fifty eight people
died during the Titan II program, which overshot any other
Cold War US missile program by a lot. An investigation
into the cause of the explosion pointed out some holes
in the existing operations and safety protocols. It's actually surprising

(42:57):
more accidents like Damascus didn't happen. There was also a
little shocking, but not surprising, to learn afterwards that the
US government would have rather had an accidental domestic detonation
than to find out that any one of their warheads
had been a dud. You know, just in case you
ever wondered how cheap human life can be considered. Hell

(43:20):
might be other people, but for those people who serve
their country in these holes, hell is a place underground.
The site of the Damascus nuclear missile explosion of nineteen
eighty has since been buried and covered up with concrete,
gravel and soil. Something I always thought was interesting about

(43:42):
Waiting to Die was the notion of the doomsday clock.
It's not a real clock, it's more symbolic. A suggestive
guide of sorts put out by the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists back in nineteen forty seven. The clock basically
represents the likelihood of a human made global catastrophe, with
midnight symbolizing the apocalypse, and over time they tweak it

(44:04):
based on current events, so things like political tensions, climate change,
and new technologies like AI and hypersonic missiles pull the
arm a little closer to midnight. In nineteen forty seven,
it was set at seven minutes to midnight, and the
farthest that has ever gotten from midnight was seventeen minutes
back in nineteen ninety one, and the closest that has

(44:25):
ever come is ninety seconds. It is currently set at
ninety seconds to midnight. If you are a regular listener,
why not use the last ninety seconds of your life
to consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill
my dream of doing this full time, and if you
and a few thousand of your friends could spare a

(44:45):
buck or two, you would really help keep the show
and frankly me alive. Before I tell you about Patreon,
if you're into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship,
you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash
doomsday to make a one time donation, and someone just
bought me ten coffees. That's absolutely amazing. I'm going to
write you please accept my deep appreciation. I think any

(45:07):
episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with
additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth
it and if you agree, you can find out more
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heartfelt shut out to Gregory Sek, Jason Coolidge, Selk, Synth,
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(45:32):
Sodopop Parker, Mimi Salin, Blair Haley, and Autumn Sunset for
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(45:55):
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(46:16):
it is, please please double check in on me. There
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(46:38):
Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one,
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Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers

(47:00):
offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath
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(47:22):
dot CA. On the next episode, bring your picnic snacks,
your bathing suit and some life insurance. It's the Meldrum
Trained Disaster of nineteen fifty nine. We'll talk soon. Save
degoggles off, and thanks for listening.

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The Damascus Nuclear Missile Explosion of 1980 | Episode 75

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Damascus Nuclear Missile Explosion of 1980 | Episode 75